Reading for life

'Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. the sober blank verse is widely spaced..and easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page. the whole book is a s delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.'

---J.B.

'Western social reality has put aside faith in bookishness as it has put aside Christianity.'

--Ivan Illich. 

My first reaction is one of delight. "Why are you reading that?," a colleague asks. "For the sheer pleasure of it," I respond. 

Second thoughts-and would those even be possible without a text? No, perhaps 'pleasure' is not the correct word since it's not a simple sensual experience. Although that way of phrasing it does have the advantage of breaking the utilitarian train of thought that is so prevalent at the university. To read something that is irrelevant, "useless" (Russell), unrelated to any extrinsic motive or benefit, to any furthering of your somewhat stumbling, faltering "career". And with no desire to either show off or explain to (or look down) on others. For the sheer sake of it. A book is a book is a book.

But that doesn't quite get to the heart of it because it can often suggest a false asceticism or an awfully elitist and narrow attitude to reading. It's hard to escape the fact that 'culture' has, for large stretches of modernity, been associated with snobbishness and an underlying class structure of exploitation. 

People invariably want to check what you've read (how much, in which language- and the more obscure, the more obtuse, the better) to put you in your place. What cannot be accepted at any cost is that someone can be (relatively) unread and still understand more about life than you. To do so would be to acknowledge all sorts of distinctions that one thought had previously been safely put to bed: the distinctions between knowledge/information and understanding/wisdom, a theoretical, 'bookish' or theoretical understanding on the one hand and an intelligence guided by practical experience, insights and skills on the other. 

Illich is, as always, quite brilliant here in suggesting another way of thinking about reading. A genuine 'thinker', rather than an academic.  

But second thoughts: why delight in seeing the shock on my colleague's face? It gradually dawned on me that his question was in fact a profoundly sad indictment of the loss of wonder in the crammed halls and minds of those in 'academentia' (to borrow a term from anton, a real reader).

"Tell me, O human heart, whether you would choose to enjoy this world forever, or to be always with God?..Love, therefore, that you might choose; love better that you might choose well...And when you love more, you will desire to reach your beloved more quickly..thus you will run through love and reach him through love."

To read in order to understand one's place in the order of things, which is wisdom. To recognize oneself and therefore other people through the art of reading (and reading well). What is reading, learning, if it doesn't aim to address fundamental questions? What kind of science is there without a science of the soul? These are, of course, questions that would generate howls of derision in the university. But Rosenzweig is worth recalling, always worth recalling, here: 

'Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars...[T]he questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...' 

Disappearing Worlds

Was that only the world we imagined?

I see it, I see it now, fleetingly.

Do I only imagine a lost country, language, a sense of first place? 

~

What mode of being is your silence, if you can tell? 

Sappho:

[..

]

This heap of fragments that you call your own, like the loose change you keep in those deep inner pockets, not to be spent or distributed, but whose occasional jingling sound throughout the day is a strange form of reassurance, like the time you keep on your inner wrist.

~~

On late Sunday evenings you would sit with your back to the high windows, the darkness falling, the ancient bats in the sky, and the old country stretching out beyond, forever. D lost in some book, the swami in some reverie of the past. Organize the indecipherable prescriptions into heaps according to name: Jones, D. Jones, Evans..what then seemed like a mundane ritual of finding and keeping order, taking stock, now seems both essential and more difficult.

Carved in flowery curling letters on a cheap wooden letter holder, the words: It's later than you think. Next to it the old projector and the film reel which, when the machine is cranked up, produces a series of shaking, flickering images of a family trip to Doddington. And an old camera, unused for fifty years, found behind the wood and mirrors. Old, slow playing LPs with distant, high-pitched voices and accents that make you smile: Yes, we have no bananas. Back from 1923, when people were trying to forget and find some other kind of light, a different hour.

Forms of communication are discarded, the well-known image fades from view, the silver inherits the black, brown speckles invade my old black & white picture and form under my skin, the tomes of obsolete words grows by the hour, the dust settles, inches its way further and I can't, for the life of me, remember a word, the one that cannot be translated, and that is found in no-one's heart.  

~

I am a bit moon and traveling salesman
I have the specialty of finding the hours
which have lost their clock.
--Vicente Huidobro

Question Everything (except this).

Found objects that became art merely by changing their context and being labelled as such..

--The Guardian.

"Here we see clearly enough: a theorist of transgressive reality, a fun gnostic constructing his own alternative version of reality, which is not an alternative but more or less what the elites of third culture themselves may be said to believe, if their beliefs were not unbeliefs. Rather, their unbeliefs are mythic, scientific and pseudoscientific systems that bring the tools of chance, of humour, of mendacity and irony, and of indifference into play."

--P. Rieff.

~
Intelligence must be corrosive if it is to be anything. Or detached, purely mechanical (as befits a mechanical age). Universities, in their own petty way, specialize in such trivialities: question everything and you will be shown the golden road (that leads nowhere). 

The world oscillates between being the result of a blind play of forces and complete determination. By chance an object is found, and some authority labels it. Of course, there is no authority, it's all provisional, a piss-take, a massive send-up and if you fail to laugh then you're really just a medievalist. 

What is freedom after all but the ability to refuse 'givenness'? Man is the measure of all things. And from that, is it so very hard to imagine that no name whatsoever inheres?

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and the Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.'

---Primo Levi.  

There is no longer any question of truth or beauty, of art pointing us elsewhere; instead, the poet or the scientist with their dull grey minds, or the professional seer with his pay cheque still wet, aim to convince us that it's all a sham, a game played by fools. There is no more "up" and no more "down" but just the endless and empty space of the cosmos, which is where we find ourselves "thrown", like hammy actors in a third-rate play.

Question everything, my friend: this tree, this table, even you before me, my friend. Let us go deeper. Language, symbols, myself, my thinking and my thought processes. I..er..in fact, 'I'..     

Human excrement. Trash. A superfluous people. After death there is nothing so why not be death now, why not die before you die? The self that closes in on itself. There is no Hell so we will create one on earth.

An educated mind

(The last photo is courtesy of Tom, over on the amazing: http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/)

~~~
I was struck, reading Wellmon & Reitter's great introduction to Nietzsche's Anti-Education, by just how timely his criticism of the universities is; and also by how those views resonate with ideas expressed some twenty years earlier by Cardinal Newman (as intimated by Macintyre).

The question goes deeper than an examination of what the university stands for since it touches on the fundamental question: what is an educated mind and how is it cultivated? A subset of interesting issues within those larger ones would lead us to ask what the political ramifications of having an educated public are. Or, to put it the other way around, what kind of political body, what type of democracy exists when individuals are nourished on so much trash? Even at the supposedly higher levels of culture the best one can muster is to question, debunk or ridicule everything (at least anything that suggests stability, common values, reflection, tradition). 

Questions.

1. Can an educated mind exist given the levels of specialization that is currently to be found in the various disciplines? To say that one is an economist, for example, would suggest that one knows something about how the economy works. But apart from at a very general and abstract level academia doesn't really foster such an approach. 

Firstly, the narrowness of one's specialization precludes a wide reading of other areas within economics. Secondly, the intellectual approach itself is so abstract and ahistorical that it becomes increasingly difficult to say much about the relation between one's theoretical understanding and the workings of particular economies in the real world. Thirdly, one has no sense of the limitations of one's analysis (either in terms of the restricted nature of one's assumptions or in the limited scope to which one's inquiries can be applied). Fourthly, how does one in reality connect the dots, as it were, across the various sub-branches of any one discipline? 

These problems are wildly exacerbated when it comes to one's understanding of any material outside one's discipline. What does an economist, for example, understand of history, sociology, anthropology or ethics and how serious are the gaps in her knowledge for a complete understanding? 

In short, does the viewpoint of modern academia simply reproduce the fragmentation of perspectives and values (not that vales are important in a technical education!) that one sees in the wider society, a dispersion that leads to a constricted and contracted mind? No unity of mind, being or knowledge.

2. Question 1, therefore, naturally leads into the question of an integrated life, its possibility and its importance. Can a university foster any sense of coherence when it sits in isolation from the wider currents of cultural developments? Of course, the university has always prided itself in being independent of societal pressures but that is to state the case only negatively, in terms of the autonomy of certain ideals. But is there a potentially positive relation as well? If the 'outside' culture is increasingly materialistic and shallow can the university really set up its own set of standards or does it only do so by becoming irrelevant to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary human lives? In the latter scenario what develops is a highly rarefied world of abstruseness and pseudo-intelligence, the world of experts and technocrats following closely on its coattails. 

The world of the stuffed mind, the bombastic showman mingling with the pedantic poseur, the super-inflated ego of the self-righteous living out the "life of the mind" in one last great hurrah. 

So, one really needs to think about the symbiosis between an educated public and the university in a positive fashion.

~
Back in the land of the pure it might be said that it is precisely this lack of education in the fuller, non-technical sense, that is woefully lacking. The absence of an educated public results in the acceptance of a coarse kind of conservatism in religious and "cultural" matters and allows a space for demagogues and manipulators in the public realm (which is, in effect, a destruction of the public realm).     
  

The seeds of division

"Tonight the seeds of division that Trump has been sowing this whole campaign finally bore fruit, and it was ugly."

~~
The unspeakable horrors of south Sudan. Black lives matter? Bullshit! 

Deathworks

I need to collect my thoughts on P. Rieff's Deathworks, but also first read it with more attentiveness instead of just plucking quotes from the text (tempting though that is).

The idea that many institutions (the media, higher education, the entertainment industry) are "anti-culture" and "anti-education" is one that resonates with your own unformulated reflections.

Thomas More's strength, opposition: "Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do, I."

In what sense 'anti-' though? To the extent that the economy and mainstream culture produces and valorizes the fragmentary, the mongrel, value neutrality, indifference (blase: the quintessential modern, urban attitude, pose, stance, gesture to everything).

Duchamps: the piss-take. Art, poetry, architecture can no longer have any "theological reference" (must not be allowed to). Everything (and everyone) must stand alone. In this reading, there is no social because there is no sacred (the cross).

If everything is a game then why bother?

~
The most appalling deathworks are not to be found in art, of course, but in the camps. The spiritual death, the nullity that was imposed on people, before their physical death. Europe, 'the west,' has not thought about this seriously enough. 

~
This egotistically invented world..accents its instability. Stability is a function of faith. I follow St. Benedict's use of stabilitas as of something inward and spiritual, otherwise invisible except as an unswerving or determined-what Kierkegaard called "engraved"-character

~

Of course, there must have been something seductive about transgression (the lure of the abyss) but no-one has stopped to think-partly because we cannot stop- what happens when transgression loses its momentum. Once the sacred has been negated and the shock of the new has lost its ability to shock what is there left to attack? Nothing is sacred, Rushdie once wrote, except, perhaps, the freedom to ridicule and debunk and mock..Je suis..  

Well, if that's what passes for intelligence it would be better to be naive and free from such sophisticated foolishness. Is there not something slightly infantile in this perpetual desire to rebel?  

What, exactly, does a university education prepare you for? Certainly not the possibility of living an open and inquisitive life, or a familiarity with some of the deepest questions (and answers) that have preoccupied so many of those before us. More likely a financially richer life, some technical skills, a casting into those rigorous ways of thinking whose contours are determined by a particular discipline. Only "rigour" here has no relation to first principles or final ends. At bottom it's not much more than a shoddy form of cleverness.

Two-nation theory

I don't really understand politics (and certainly not American politics). Interestingly, it wouldn't surprise you if what most people understand is based on a few soundbites here, an odd article there. Perhaps you/they listen to a speech or overhear what some friends are talking about, but it's rarely anything deeper or more considered than that. Which does make you wonder: democracy doesn't really cut that deep and what grip it does have on us is produced through a thousand diffused impacts on our general culture and way of speaking.  

Much has been made of how Trumpet signals a radical departure for the Republican Party, a move away from its "reality based" core (the notion of consensus, diplomacy, decency and an aversion-perhaps for strategic reasons-to letting the whacky, "fringe" elements call the shots). 

But is that really just the view we have from here? Someone who had actually lived through the 50s, the 60s and onward might not think there was anything that strange about the showmanship and extremism of the current candidates. Is there something inherently extreme about conservatism (or, to put it in historical terms: has conservatism been a radical project for some time now?).

It's obvious that something has changed and it's this: the conservatives and extremists (I make no distinction) have come to power. This is not just the case in the States (think India, Iran, Saudi, Pakistan and many other places. Europe could be well on its way there as well). And so we'd really need to think more deeply about the cultural and social changes that have resulted in that takeover (as well as its likely consequences). Since power has a tendency to latch onto and reinforce certain dynamics are we, then, in the midst of important changes (the end of the left, for example?). 

The key to this shift, if that's what it is, is that it's not just a cultural one but an economic one too-and the two are deeply intertwined. It's not simply that conservatism is a reaction to globalization or changes in the economy (work insecurity, migration, the loss of blue-collar work); it's not that conservatism is simply an antidote to the sense of loss felt by those who lose out in an ever-more precarious world (white middle classes, for example, or a bazzari class that embraces the platitudes of the hate-mongerers). Conservatism isn't simply a response to fear (that would suggest that we limit our attention to a purely psychological reading). The key thing is this:

"The formation of a cast of mind that makes it harder for..us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began".

The rise of conservatism co-exists with the rise of neo-liberalism. That's what needs to be analysed. Conservatism needs to create the fear, insecurity because it realises that's where it can cash in.

The moral universe is divided into two-"the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe and sane."

But, of course, all of that is very old hat. When wasn't America a 'hell-fire nation"? When wasn't there the good cowboy or the cavalry to the rescue? This is such an old and recurrent theme you begin to wonder if it's universal, if what we should be thinking about is continuities and not discontinuities: the Redeemer, the Hero who restores order, helps the community reclaim its moral authority in a world that has been out of kilter for a while. And so, the conservatives need their barbarians, their wild hordes on the steppes (Injuns, witches, gays, commies..all undermining religion, family, liberty, the american way, goddamit). 

It's time for the moral majority to take back Washington since it's full of insiders and special interest groups and the unpatriotic. The great difficulty with that argument is that the very same conservatives' advocacy of a "free enterprise"-which has, for all practical purposes come to be dominated by large corporations-has resulted in the erosion of the "values" and "culture" they supposedly hold so dear.   

The left has run out of steam (partly because it's achieved so much of what it set out to and partly because it was co-opted by the establishment). The real action is on the other side. 

"This is where the energy is. This is where the future of the party is!"

The sense that nothing happened in the 70s, nothing new, just a rehash of all that was known (the beginning of 'retro'). An anti-climax to the 60s and a vague blur compared to the harsh outlines of the political culture of the 80s.

"America was on its knees, where it finally had a chance to face its flaws and learn from them- to grow up."

But that was the time before finance and the media changed all that. That other world, or what's left of it, persists in a tattered and frayed form, the old-world values and outlooks somehow surviving-just-but for the larger part they only form a memory of a different way of living in the world. There's probably nothing like historical inevitability but it's hard to imagine older habits and mentalities continuing for much longer. In that sense, the past really is another country. 

{Words by Rick Perlstein}

In the house

People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.
---Kamel Daoud.

'When his master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "yes, we have plenty of good food." "We" have plenty of good food. When the master said that "We have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes, we have a fine home here"..When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master's house out than the master himself would...

The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master's clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house-probably in the basement or the attic-but he still lived in the house.'

--Malcolm X.

~
When someone is presumptuous enough to think that they can think and speak on behalf of "the Arab world" or "the Muslim world" you take note because it usually indicates the presence of a house niggah in the house. "People in the West". Crikey! To think, this person is supposed to be a novelist, something that should, you think, be a reason to suggest that he has at the very least has a token notion of the particularity of human lives. 

To state the bleedin' obvious: it would be no surprise if, in some 'Muslim countries' (what is even meant by that term?), there are lots of truly horrific things going on or that there is a kind of everyday misogyny that goes unheard. But has this joker stopped to consider another hypothesis: "People in the West" are discovering that sex in the "non-Muslim world" is also sick?

~

"As always, we are judged by our language."

Of course, one can exhibit fascist tendencies in any language (Strumpet being a case in point) but you do wonder if an English sensibility (which includes some awareness of the correct use of language) militates against some forms of extremism? The language is shot though with doubts and partial uncertainties ("perhaps", "maybe," "er," "possibly," "you could say..," "in some sense..," "on the one hand..,") and all of that makes it more difficult for extreme voices to rear their ugly head.

On the other hand, there is often something small and petty about the 'island race'. Not sure if that's just your usual confluence of a small town mentality and cultural (and/or racial) homogeneity. So, there's a strain in the English sensibility which is also loutish, xenophobic, almost, but it is hardly ever a dominant one and is usually tempered by the wider and deeper counter-currents of tolerance and mildness. Be that as it may, thirty years on after neo-liberalism and those harsher tendencies have come to the fore. What, exactly, has the legacy of liberalism been?

~ 

 To hear Americans speak of freedom or democracy usually produces a bout of justified merriment on the other side of the pond. It's not just that they've supported so many dictators and been involved in so many questionable 'escapades' (to put it politely)..it's the sheer wide-eyed naivete of their pronouncements, it's the candour with which these views are expressed, with not even the slightest whiff of hesitation or sophistication. And so it follows that there is a remarkable absence of even the vaguest hint of what other people might think of those blunt and brash statements. The fact that most people can see through those 'ideas' ("the land of the brave and the free") is something that is wholly lost on them. 

That America is rapidly becoming the laughing stock of the world, however, is only now becoming all too painfully obvious.  

And so, what of the 'Party of Abraham Lincoln'?

'The Republican Party, having spent years courting the basest impulses in American political culture, now sees the writing on the wall. It reads "Donald Trump," in very big letters.'
--David Remnick.

Trump in the house? Now, there's a thought to ponder for the world's greatest democracy!

~
And now we are engaged in tense—potentially hostile—engagements with Muslims around the world. It made sense in dealing with Germany before World War II or with Russia during the cold war for serious people to have read Mein Kampf or Das Kapital. Yet many of those fighting for Germany or Russia had themselves not read Mein Kampf or Das Kapital. The same cannot be said of Muslims and the Koran. 
--Gary Wills, NYRB.

Who, exactly, is this "we?




  

Disappearing world

In dark times what is there to do but wait it out, remain small, unknown.

~
In dark times what is there to do but wait it out, remain small, silent, unknown? A time for gathering, for re-assessing, for traveling (not-traveling) on that faded path least taken. Like the monks from a thousand years ago, walking in the night, knee-high in the swamps, through the howling winds, wasted landscapes, to keep the word in the world, to leave a small door open for others, to imagine a return, a particular set of images that you always carry with you, deep within, like a place of refuge, the calmness of mid-morning, a verandah at the back of the house, full of late afternoon sunshine and the small lemon tree in the long grass...  

'May I hope that this is the second volume of your Gnosis? At that, there entered into my soul too, still rent by the Unspeakable I had just learnt about in my erstwhile home-the fate of my mother and the untold others-for the first time something like peace again: at beholding the constancy of thought and loving interest across the ruin of a world. Suddenly I knew: one can resume and continue that for which one needs faith in man.'
--Hans Jonas.

The 'constancy of thought and loving interest'. This sounds incredibly old-fashioned to our ears since it recalls a former time when we could talk and think about the virtues, and in particular a virtue like constancy. An unswerving ability to keep your life steady, to maintain balance throughout all the various vicissitudes of life. But not simply a disposition or a feeling, more a way of life, a way of being in the world- and since the virtues are profoundly intertwined with one another constancy is related to, but not the same thing as, courage, patience, sobriety, judgement...

To keep pace with yourself (not with the times). To find your groove, let what was inessential fall away. What we lose most of all in dark times is a proper sense of time. To think that our lives were once more attuned to the passing of the seasons, the rhythms of the earth. In a disappearing world, at the end of times, there is no space left. 

There is the inescapable human tragedy of the "migrant crisis"-the individual stories (or, more precisely, the dry accounts of nameless deaths), the more general story of despair and the unraveling of settled lives-but there is also the sense that all of this is a foreboding of some looming, imminent catastrophe just over the horizon. Not, for sure, a catastrophe in the sense of a single event but more as a sign of the fact that human beings are exhausted (G. Steiner writes, some would say prophetically, that there are no more beginnings). A sign, then, of the times, the shadow, we live under today.

In an age of the "verified self" (and what a mockery it is to think that we are still in any substantial way free) there is a border post set up along any and every road. We acquiesce to the demands because, hey, there's nothing to hide anyway. When I got to Oakland there was no Oakland there-and no 'I' either. D.H.L. once wrote (if memory serves me correctly) that there would be a time when human beings would not be able to stand the odour of other human beings. A sheer animal distrust of others, the avoidance of their gaze, signals the disappearance of the world but since the human imagination cannot exist in a vacuum it creates another world, an underworld. 

Look me in the eye kid and tell me if you are who you say you are. 
Purpose of visit? 
Last port?  
Duration of stay?
Have you suffered..

Sign and Declare, so help you God.


  

Crow

I was going to write about narcissism after reading Zoe Williams's article but then decided against it because this struck me as altogether more vital:

"The main thing is the love I have for the people around me, and I only really focus on compassion and forgiveness because that's the only way and I didn't used to do that at all.

I took too long to grow up, and now I've got that perspective on what my life should be about I've probably never been happier."

--Martin Crowe.

~

The keys you hold, the daily transitions through the dihliz of the heart, not sure of what to let go off, what to hold on to, of what you leave behind and what awaits you. Sometimes you lose the keys. And then? And then you are left at the centre of a circle..waiting.

The heart turns, alights on no form, swoops at an awkward angle, like a crow that bends down to pick up some litter.

~
"Till this moment I never knew myself"

Not through abstraction, philosophy; not through religion, thinking or the sheer passage of time. What is it, then, that leads you to this semblance of an understanding? 

Cultural capital

"One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour." 

Men are reduced to walk--on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen."

The same type of conductor who undertakes the insatiably engrossed celebration of the Adagio of Bruckner's Eighth lives a life closely akin to that of the head of a capitalist combine.."

'Pop culture was acquiring its own cultic aspect, one neatly configured for technological dissemination.'

'Champions of online life promised a utopia of infinite availability.'

An advert directly following this article (by Alex Ross) runs:

What are the most important aspects of your personal economy?

~

If culture had once at least afforded the possibility of some kind of resistance to the onslaught of capitalism and market mentalities it now seems ever-more true to say that it is little but a handmaiden of that expansion. 

I think this was realized very early on (the 1960s and possibly even earlier if the swinging twenties are taken into account). That markets and consumerism are a way of breaking the hold of the old, inherited hierarchies of a feudal order is itself a very old theme in the history of modernity (Adam Smith). It has helped to foster the idea that the only freedom of note is a 'freedom from'.

A return to worldly life as a source of meaning in contradistinction to the positing of some form of transcendental aspiration, in radical opposition to the notion that there was something like a human nature and a telos of Man. No, this was it and this was as good as it gets. Deal with it, make your peace with the settled habits of living an earthly and bodily life and string the moments together as best you can.

But there was always the nagging suspicion that there is an accidental life and a true life and nothing that was said nor any human system that was devised could quite quell that unease. So, in addition to the lust for power and status and money indifference and comfort had to be added to the mix for us to think of a self-sustaining reality. 

Dispose of any notion of distinction (a "higher" and a "lower" make no sense in the realm of scientific facts),

But what of art, poetry, literature, all the things that suggest we are not just a chance agglomeration of matter? These too, in their time, had to be subsumed to the dominant ideology. Art for art's sake (which is to abandon the idea that it can be related to the human good) or the setting up of arbitrary and subjective taste as the ultimate arbitrator in these matters. This was another way of saying that it was the quantitative feature of desires or preferences that counted as 'the good'. Which is to say, in effect, that in a Gnostic age power and force are the key determinants. Either that or everything is a wild game of chance that has no intrinsic value.

Culture is supposed to be radical because it helps break down the solid structures of the capitalist order (except, breaking things down into the fragmentary is precisely what is required by late capitalism). The idea that there is no continuity to the self is supposed to be liberating since we avoid all fixed roles. But such a perspective (a "view from nowhere") has been tremendously useful for a system that requires both the constant re-invention of the self and the fluidity of values. "Go with the flow". "Just do it". Screen capitalism plays its role in this as well. Not just in terms of distraction and entertainment (in an age of boredom nothing sounds more valuable than a bit of showbiz), but in fostering the constant desire to "update" and to follow the latest bit of trivia.